Around The Web

In The Conversation, Cardiff University psychiatrist Stefanie Linden discusses her own research, reviewing old records of World War I veterans and their experiences of...

The Independent reports that the National Health Service (NHS) in Dundee prescribed antidepressants to 450 children, some as young as seven years old, in...

From The New York Times: The opioid epidemic is wreaking havoc on Cherokee families and putting Cherokee children at risk. Now, the Cherokee Nation has...

From The New York Times: Months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island is experiencing a severe mental health crisis. Public health officials say...

In an article titled "What You Really Need to Know About Antidepressants," the New York Times repeats, yet again, the fraudulent results from the...

-Mind Hacks has an interview with Will Davies, author of The Happiness Industry, that "looks at the history and practice of positive psychology as government, and ‘well-being’ as a way of managing people."

-The next "Maudsley Debates" event, on May 13, 2015 in London, will pit Sami Timimi and Peter Gøtzsche against Allan Young and John Crace.

On Tuesday, NPR told the story of DeAngelo Cortijo. DeAngelo became a foster kid at age 3 after his mother attempted suicide. He was “diagnosed with bipolar and anxiety disorders, attachment disorder, intermittent explosive disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder,” and was prescribed “a combination of antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, and was told that taking them was his only hope of being normal.” Through equine therapy, DeAngelo was eventually able to get off all of his medication. Now, California is hoping to pass reforms that would prevent foster kids, like DeAngelo, from being “prescribed antipsychotic drugs at double to quadruple the rate of that not in foster care.”

-"The civic lawsuit demands that Comptom schools incorporate proven practices that address trauma..."

Jerome Kagan, professor of psychology emeritus from Harvard University, says that "scientists studying psychological phenomena should replace their habit of linking one cause to...

-The Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry is hosting a one-day conference in London, England on September 18th, entitled More Harm Than Good: Confronting the Psychiatric Medication Epidemic.

The Mercury News reports that California’s judicial council is taking major steps to address the rampant use of psychiatric drugs in foster care. The...

The Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies' Winter 2014 Bulletin is freely available. Among other articles, the issue includes a personal story of a patient,...

In The Opinion Pages of the New York Times, Matthew Epperson discusses the devastating results of police acting as the primary responders to mental health crises. “If we are to prevent future tragedies, then we should be ready to invest in a more responsive mental-health system and relieve the police of the burden of being the primary, and often sole, responders.”

From Scientific American: Doctor-patient communication is an incredibly important part of medical treatment. However, doctors often do not have the time or resources to be...

The Guardian reports growing concerns from the Buddhist Society conference: “Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts medical school, warned last week that some people feared a ‘sort of superficial ‘McMindfulness’ is taking over, which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential.’”

From HealthNewsReview.org: The 10th World Conference of Science Journalists, which occurred recently in San Francisco, received $600,000 total from pharmaceutical and healthcare product companies. In...

The staff at Minneapolis’ Southside Village Boys and Girls Club are implementing  a specially targeted free interactive counseling toolkit designed by a team of volunteers...

Listen: NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook discusses the new book “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, The Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy,” by the psychiatrist Julie Holland.

AlterNet prudently asks: "Does your therapist have a blind spot? Every therapist has to have a theory that guides his or her work. We can’t...

Paul Woodward of Beyond Meds critiques the Washington Post's report on the reduction of gun control, and increase in mental health-care budgets, following Sandy...

“Another good reason to make 2016 the year you follow your bliss.” For the Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs scours the psychological literature on the connection between our sense of meaning in life and our behaviors. He finds that “people possessing a sense of purpose are more likely to make choices that pay off in the long run, and less likely to get sidetracked by the need for short-term gratification.”

-A Washington Post story suggests that Centers for Disease Control researchers are worried about what they'll find if they investigate the causes of gun violence.

Last year, eleven years after the suicide of Dan Markingson in a University of Minnesota drug study, external investigations found evidence of coerced study recruitment, troubling conflicts of interest, shoddy scientific review, deep mistrust of U leaders, and a climate of fear and intimidation in the Psychiatry Department. U leaders solemnly promised the people of Minnesota that they were finally going to clean up the mess. Last week, yet another investigation found that nothing has changed.

Psychiatrist Sarah Mourra writes, in The Atlantic; "This isn't to say that people don't need to be on medication -- but this psychopharmacological myopia...